Monthly Archives: December 2007
The Hunter as Honest Locavore
Barbera over at Tigers & Strawberries wrote an interesting piece on Hunters and Locavores. She says at the end of the article: Hunters here are pretty much what I would classically call a locavore, in the most visceral and true sense possible. They go out, find their meat on the hoof, stalk it, kill it, field dress it (a very unpleasant process–you gut and bleed it right there in the woods–and it is a smelly, messy task–trust me on this), and either take it to a butcher to process it, or, if they have the equipment, they skin, behead and cut up the carcass themselves. Personally, I think that anyone who has the stomach to do this deserves respect. Because they not only are confronting the ugly reality that meat must come from a living being head on–they are doing a good portion of the dirty work of making meat edible on their own. As one of the few hunters I know who would apply the word locavore to themselves, I have a few additional thoughts on the matter. Not only… Read more
Ground Zero of the Obesity Epidemic? The Center of Your Grocery… Read more
Science v. Faith – the flowchart… Read more
The 50 most loathsome people in America for 2007 — you’re in there… Read more
Most (il)Literate American Cities
Does anyone actually care about what city is the most literate in the US, a country in which the vast majority of books sold or borrowed from libraries exist only to keep fat people on couches from feeling a vague shame when watching other fat people on daytime television? Of course, when you measure literacy by consumption of books-as-objects (or is that media loci as objects?) instead of understanding of literature, I suppose that the view that Oprah is the best thing to happen to literature since Skikibu (who?) seems more reasonable. How about we rank cities by how many random people on the street can correctly pronounce Mahabharata… seems just as relevant, if not maybe a bit more… Read more
Juries & Laws
Why do we (as Americans) see no problem with the fact that private citizens, the “average Janes and Joes”, are allowed, expected even, to sit in judgment of another persons life, but are not to be trusted, or even consulted really, on how to spend our tax monies or deploy our… Read more
Rudy Guiliani: mein… Read more
The features we identify today with liberal democracy and freedom (trade unions, universal vote, freedom of the press, etc.) are far from natural fruits of capitalism. The lower classes won them by waging long, difficult struggles throughout the 19th century. Modern-day China is not an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, but rather the repetition of capitalism’s development in Europe… Read more
Emotional responsiveness to streaming media harks back to the world of primary orality. The decline of reading is the decline of doubt. Welcome to the age of secondary… Read more
“The Victorian freak show never went away, now it’s called ‘Big Brother’ or ‘American Idol” Ricky Gervais gets on his high… Read more